“This ambition was fired by the man whose name Robinson took for his most famous creation. An alcoholic upper-class scoundrel, Johnny Withnall (Robinson added the ‘I’) was a friend of Robinson’s father. Obliterated on booze, he took the young Bruce out for a spin in his Aston, stopping occasionally to fling open his door and spew. Bruce was thrilled.

“I must have been eight or 10,’ he recalls. ‘I can’t remember if it was a DB4 or a DB2 but he used to drive in state of complete Messerschmitt pilot danger. Completely pissed. And I really fancied all of that when I was a kid.”

So what’s he been up to? Well apparantly looking adapting Hunter S Thompson’s Rum Diary for za big screen. Again sourced from Richards article:

“I don’t think anybody can drink like that and stay alive,’ he says. ‘I met him in the Chateau Marmont, that big hotel on Sunset (Boulevard) and he had 200 Dunhills, an industrial coke grinder you could mince trees with, huge pile of coke, huge bag of grass, two bottles of Chivas, and he was presiding over that with a towel over his head, sitting at the table. And in an hour and a half of being there, ostensibly to talk to him, I didn’t say a word to him. Not a single word. He was just so blown. When he went to the bathroom inside his suite it was like a pinball, bouncing off the walls. Christ, that’s a sad sight.”